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siege, not signs of an impending war. Antonina wondered how they could have guessed so wrong, and Jan concentrated on hiding his family somewhere safe while he remained at the zoo to tend the animals as long as possible and await orders.
    "Warsaw will soon be closed," he reasoned, "and the German army is advancing from the east, so I think it's best if you return to the cottage in Rejentówka."
    She pondered this, then decided, despite misgivings: "Yes, at least it's a place we know, one Ryś associates with good times." Really, she had no idea, but persisted in packing, relying on Jan's hunch, then climbed into a cart loaded for what might be a long absence, and set out quickly before the roads grew too crowded.
    The resort village of Rejentówka lay only about twenty-five miles away, but Antonina and a cart driver spent seven hours en route, sharing the dirt road with thousands of people, mainly on foot, since cars, trucks, and most horses had been confiscated by the military. Women, children, and old men hurried along in a worried trance, escaping the city with whatever they could carry, some pushing baby buggies, wagons, and hand trolleys, some hauling suitcases and small children, but most wearing several layers of clothing, with knapsacks, bags, and shoes slung across their bodies or swinging from their necks.
    Flanking the road, tall poplars, pine, and spruce juggled large brown balls of mistletoe in their limbs; and black-and-white storks nested atop the telephone poles, still fattening up for their arduous flight to Africa. Soon farm fields quilted both sides of the road, grain glistening and tassels pointing skyward. Antonina wrote of sweat pouring in rivulets and breath bunching, the air clotted with dust.
    A storm's distant rumble became a cloud of gnats on the horizon, then grew to German aircraft looming near in seconds, chewing up the skies, flying low overhead, panicking people and horses alike. Pelted by bullets, everyone hurried through clouds of flying dirt, the unlucky fell, and the relatively lucky fled beneath splattering machine-gun fire. Dead storks, redwings, and rooks littered the road along with tree branches and dropped satchels. Catching a bullet was sheer chance and for seven hours Antonina beat the odds, but not without scenes of the dead and dying etched into memory.
    At least her son, in Rejentówka, was spared these images, so hard to erase, especially for a small child whose brain, busily sampling the world, was learning what to expect and stitching those truths in place at a trillion connections. Stay prepared for this world the rest of your life , a child's brain tells itself, a world of mayhem and uncertainty . "That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," Nietzsche wrote in The Twilight of the Idols , as if the will could be annealed like a Samurai sword that is heated and pounded, bent and reforged, until it becomes indestructible. But the metal of a little boy, what does the pounding do to him? Mixed with Antonina's worry about her son was moral outrage that the Germans "in this modern war, so different from wars we knew, allowed the killing of women, children, and civilians."
    As the dust settled, blue sky returned and she noticed two Polish fighters attacking a heavy German bomber above a field. From afar, the geometry of the scene looked homely, like fierce wrens driving off a hawk, and people cheered whenever the fighters stung the bomber with tufts of smoke. Surely an air force that agile could repel the Luftwaffe? Threads of tinsel flashed in the waning sunlight, and suddenly the bomber gushed a fountain of blood-red flames and fell to earth in a sharp curve. Then a white jellyfish floated above the peaks of the pine trees: a German pilot swaying under his parachute, slowly descending through a cornflower-blue sky.
    Like many Poles, Antonina didn't realize the magnitude of danger, relying instead on a Polish air force that boasted superbly trained and famously courageous